I’m writing a … thing. One of the characters in the story is female, and related to the protagonist. But she’s married, so her surname has changed.

I spent hours racking my brain, and finally came up with a first name that had a certain amount of alliteration with her maiden surname, and didn’t sound awful with the married last name I wanted to give her, a nod to Sherlock Holmes because the story is a mystery.

The final, married name I came up with for her?

Well, I bounced around merrily for a few minutes, pleased with myself for crafting such a perfect name. I told my fiancee, Maria, and she looked at me blankly, before saying, “Isn’t that the girl from Harry Potter?”

According to my indie author mentor Bernard Schaffer, self-publishing is a double-edged sword. You’re ultimately responsible for your own success or failure, because you are in charge of not just the quality of your product, but also its presentation and marketing.

I’ve seen some awful covers in the indie world, and I’ve seen some great ones. This isn’t going to be a discussion about that. I just have a pair of points to make real quick before I go on:

1) Using licensed art from a site can be dangerous: A friend recently experienced a slight setback when it was pointed out that someone else was using the same cover art as him for ebooks released within a week of one another. Fortunately, the two writers knew each other well and got it taken care of without any hard feelings: it wasn’t that the art was stolen or anything, it was just a licensing thing. I helped whip up a new cover for my friend.

2) Trying to make your own cover, without any kind of talent for it, is equally dangerous. I have what’s called an artist’s eye, but none of the talent, so I at least know what I want. But when it’s outside of the scope of my abilities, I know better than to try it.

So what do you do?

Well, for The Machinist Part One: Malevolence, I had a specific image in my mind that came to me. It was inspired by the classic Spider-Man story from the 60’s, “Spider-Man No More!” I actually own the two issues that make up that plot, though they’re in terrible condition. They replicated the layout of that cliffhanger splash page in Spider-Man 3: Too Many Fucking Villains.

While I do really love the cover as it stands, the scene it shows never happens in the story. I’m working the amazingly talented Mark Williams on a new cover for Part One, and we’re in talks about Part Three (once I finalize the appearance of the main villain)… and I have an amazing idea for the collected Parts One through Three (available March 2062 at the rate I write).

How I found Mark, and Doug (the artist of the original Part One cover) was pretty easy, honestly. I went on DeviantArt, and started searching for paintings (digital or traditional) of superheroes. I might be biased from having played the game for seven years, but searching for commissions of City of Heroes characters tends to net you quality stuff if you’re seeking out superhero or cyborg themed art. I found artists, I looked at their galleries, flagged stuff I liked and then looked at their own favorite artists or pieces, and repeated the process. I found three or four artists I liked, and sent them direct messages. I can’t pull up the exact ones, but here’s the jist of it:

“Hello! I really love your work, in particular <something of theirs>. I am working on a self-published ebook that needs a cover and think your style would be a match. Can you email me back with your rate and terms if you are interested? Thank you! <my name> <my personal email address>”

After waiting a few days—and leaving the artists alone, you pesterers—I got replies from all. A few “no thanks” but several “sures.” And quotes, or requests for more information, then quotes. I didn’t go for the cheapest options, but I got the best value (this is subjective, of course) for the quality of the art versus the price. I worked out a payment plan with Doug that was split in three: a partial advance, some more when he sent me conclusive proof of progress, and a final payment after a final proof was approved. After that, he sent me the full size final image. Mark, we just did a 50-50 split (advance, then proof, then final payment, then he sent the full image) because his rates were less painful than Doug’s.

You can, of course, get your art other ways. I’ve done some covers in Photoshop for friends, for no charge just because I like them or because they’re as broke as I used to be. One friend of mine gets his covers from his graphic designer brother, or alternately from an artist he met through his ex-wife. Another person I know is an actual graphic artist in his day job, so he’s able to make his own (Michael Shean, you cover and website-making artsy bastard. I’ll get you).

So back to my original point, that you—the glorious self-publishing, promotion-managing and ultimately-responsible-for-their-own-success individual that you are—are probably most curious about: The process of collaborating on the cover for your book.

The topic of today’s essay will be the creation of the spectacular cover for The Machinist Part Two: Retaliation that Mark Williams did for me. I’m going to use some sample sketches from emails between myself and Mark, who has graciously given me permission to do so.

The first issue I wanted to address with my second cover was I wanted it to have some action. The first novella’s cover is kind of bland, in addition to not actually featuring any content that appeared in the story itself (Mark and I are working on something new that fits the story better). So I made sure I had an action sequence in mind that I knew was going to make it into the final version of the story.

I envisioned that Mac was being assaulted by an unknown, electricity-wielding opponent. I know who that character is, but I’m being intentionally vague since the book is months away from release. This enemy has overpowered Mac and knocked him to the floor, and is hovering over him in a menacing way. Electricity crackles around the assailant’s black, power armor covered forearms and fists.

Here’s the final version of the cover. After you have a look, I’ll tell you the story of its production:

I sent that description, and character reference art I’ve had produced previously, up to Mark. I also sent him a template for the basic layout of the cover’s text element placement and he got back to me in a day or two with his initial sketch. I’m not posting it, because it showed off too much of our mystery villain’s body and would’ve given away a big chunk of plot. There was also an issue with the actual pose, in my opinion. I know Mark forgave me for this, but I wrote back and explained the issues I had with the sketch, and wasn’t terribly kind. But he’s got thick skin like me, understood that I was going for a certain look to make a dynamic cover, and he just got back to work. He’s trying to make a living, and so am I, and we’re responsible for the quality of our own work: If he ticked off a client with a bad commission and fought over it, he wouldn’t get paid and might lose referrals. If I have a bad cover for my book, no one’s going to buy it and my fiancée’s going to yell at me for wasting time writing. We’re in similar boats, so we worked it out.

Mark, I’m sure, had a good laugh, and wrote me back in a few hours with his take on it. This time, the mystery assailant was perfect, but Mac’s pose was a tad bit off.

I rearranged Mac’s limbs in Photoshop, attached it to an email, and explained what I was thinking. The next day, Mark sent me this:

Fuckin’ perfect sketch. I gave Mark the thumbs-up and let him go at it. After a day or two, he sent me his first run at the image’s background, which I thought was interesting enough to share here.

After a little more time and a few iterations that involved changing the color palette a little bit, we got here:

As you can see, aside from a few things, it was mostly done. I had an issue with how Mark had arranged the electricity on the bad guy’s arms, and sent my own sketch back. He followed through! I asked if it was too much to ask to have the scene be a dark day, with rain and puddles, and stuff—honestly expecting Mark to say no or ask for more money. He did neither, and eventually we got here:

There were a number of things I noticed immediately that were different, on top of what I’d asked for: Mac’s coat was actually leather, his metal was, well, metal, and the light was glowing. This was some quality stuff. I showed it to all my friends, who consistently bugged out at its awesomeness.

So that’s the story of Machinist 2’s cover. And just for your entertainment, here’s my sketch for the Philadelphia Comic Con 2013 promotional story Mark did a cover for, and his near-final product. I sent him some reference along with that crap sketch, but I had a specific pose (kinda) in mind.

I guess you could say that the jist of this article is to point out the fact that even if you cannot produce art yourself, you need to know what you want from your cover and be as informative and communicative about your desires as you possibly can be. Because you’re the one whose livelihood may count on sales that your cover brings in.

Hey guys! With the closing of Philadelphia Comic Con 2013, I’m taking down my exclusive free short story. If you read it and enjoyed it, feel free to leave me a comment below.

If you haven’t read it, don’t despair: Sometime in the coming months, “Making Time” will be one of a handful of short stories set in the Machinist world that will be collected together and released as a .99 cent ebook.

Today I spoke with Bernard Schaffer and William Vitka as part of a panel of indie writers about the current state of the self-publishing industry. Mike Shean was unable to attend due to personal reasons that came up at the last minute. We spoke our pieces, did some Q and A during the whole presentation, and we got down on the floor to talk with our peers. It went really well.

The conference room we used was shared with another prior panel of writers, those of the old guard—people who had gone through the traditional publication route, who had met with some degree of success in their lives (Though I can’t see success being defined as a screenwriter who hasn’t produced anything that rated higher than 35% on RottenTomatoes—let alone anything at all in almost a decade… but I digress). I’m not jealous of success by any means, since I’m doing well enough myself–not quit my job to live my authorial dreams good, but well enough to keep a roof over my head when I needed it. If you’re making money doing what you like, that’s the goddamn American dream, isn’t it?

What pissed me off was twofold. After running ten minutes over their allotted time, the host of the prior panel was asked to announce our panel since the crowd they had gotten clearly had an interest in writing and might be interested in what we might have to say. He got on the mic and mumbled, “Hang around for the Independent something,” and walked away.

I asked a simple question of the members of the prior panel as our group entered the hall, not knowing their identities. (It’s worth mentioning that none of their names struck a bell after I did find out who they were; a Google search at home cleared that up and did not impress.) I asked, very simply, “Are you writers, too?”

They literally guffawed at me in that, “This guy doesn’t know who I am” way. One snickered, “You could say so.” His particular curriculum vitae includes a number of comic books for a company that failed terribly in the late nineties and little else afterwards.

My career for decades has been in customer service, so I deal with the loudest mouths and the rudest attitudes on a daily basis. Unperturbed, I asked them if they’d be interested in staying on to participate with our panel.

“We have places to be,” announced an author who writes what are essentially glorified book reports: books about other books. None of the rest of the crowd had any response. They pushed their way out the door and faded into the bustle of Philadelphia’s convention center.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

That bothered the hell out of me, for reasons I knew immediately and will get to in a moment. I put it at the back of my mind during the panel and had a wonderful time—If you were there: Yes, I imagined you naked. But only a little. I’m getting married, you harpy.

I have no problem with speaking in public. In a past job I taught a room full of salespeople from all over the entire east coast how to talk their way into someone’s home and get them to buy an extended warranty that they had refused while at the store they’d bought their products from. I’m that terrible of a human being, yes, but that’s beside the point: I’ve no issue talking to people no matter how uncomfortable the situation is.

Back on point: Bernard will attest to the fact that there was quite a bit of ego in that room during the prior panel, as he sat in on it and tried to ask some questions of the presenters. After hearing about that, and based on the brief exchange I’d just had, I realized something: These people were a clique. A clique of writers.

The audience members that stayed from their panel looked generally wary of us when we first sat down. That is, until Bernard launched his opening volley, asking the audience if anyone was a writer, if anyone wanted to be one. And then we talked to them, one by one, as they raised their hands and told us—proudly—about the books they’d written, the short stories they’d self-published, the chapters they hadn’t yet brought together as a complete organism. They asked us questions—and we answered as honestly as possible—about the tiniest minutiae of what we’ve done, what successes and failures we’d had, what mistakes we’ve made and what they could learn from not repeating them. People smiled, laughed at our dick jokes, and nodded their heads. People were taking notes. At least one lady in the front row started recording us on video.

At the end of it, we got down on the floor and talked to people. I met an aspiring comic artist and his partner, talked to a guy who had never written in his life but wanted to start, and answered questions for another guy who had been published traditionally and wanted to know more about Kindle Direct Publishing and Createspace. Vitka and Bernard had similar experiences.

I had a thought after the third conversation and jumped back onto the stage and grabbed the mic as the poor Wizard World volunteers were trying to throw out our nametags and half-finished Dasanis’. I announced to the crowd to take our cards, to email us, to talk to us more with any more questions.

Why did I do that?

Because for forty-five minutes, we talked to those people—as people. As equals.

As a community.

And I want the conversation to continue… forever. Because we writers should be a community, and communities help each other.

As a whole, we authors should be inclusive, inviting, respectful, and honest.

Sure, you need to have thick skin, because everything everyone writes is crap until it gets polished into gold–But I mean it when I say everything and everyone. A friend who is looking out for your well-being, who is trying to make you better at what you love, is going to make you re-write that passive sentence you slapped onto your first page. They’re going to tell you that your story has an enormous plot hole and you should rethink how the macguffin that manipulates your protagonist’s mind during the climax. I frequently talk to aspiring writers through email: I recently helped a guy bring turn his two paragraph story idea into a really thrilling 40k word detective story. I don’t mind doing that kind of thing, if I’ve got the time to. But if your idea is terrible, I’ll tell you. We help each other. If the help hurts, so be it. I’ve been told I suck—but I’ve been told why, and how to reduce the suck. I knuckled down and got shit fixed, learned my lesson, and now I feel nothing but appreciation for the people who were honest with me.

I am part of a very small, but growing, community of independent writers. I want this community to get even bigger because I’m tired of cliques. I never want to be high and mighty; I don’t want to live in a shining tower of authorial greatness. I kind of like it down here in relative obscurity.

Independent writers: The old guard of the publishing industry calls ebooks the slushpile. That’s a quote, by the way, from one of the presenters at the panel that preceded ours. What does that tell you about how they feel about you and your work?

Meanwhile, me Bernard and Vitka asked you questions. We tried to answer yours. We told you all the places you can look for help, and we opened ourselves up to be spoken to privately and outside the confines of the meeting hall.

We want to succeed and we want you to succeed. We want your help, and we want to help you at the same time. You’re not the slushpile, you’re not the scum. You’re us. And we’re you.

EDIT:

Today I received an email from Shane Vidaurri, who was on the panel prior to ours. He apologized on behalf of the other panelists and made it clear that he was a human being. I need to make right by him, and say that, no, Shane was not a dick to us. He was the one person in that group that did no wrong, and unfortunately, in my anger, I forgot to make note of that. Shane, wherever you are: Thank you for being genuine, and I hope that your reputation was not damaged in any way by association with the people I railed against, or by my railing itself. I hope you and I are able to open the same kind of dialogue I want to engage every aspiring and published creator in, and that this experience doesn’t tarnish our chances of accomplishing that.

This weekend is the 2013 Philadelphia Comic Con, and I’ll be attending. As a matter of fact, attentive readers of this site will know that I’m speaking as part of a panel of independent and self-published authors on Sunday June 2nd at 1pm (room 109 I think?). I hope to see a few fans there!

Anyway, to celebrate, I’ll be putting up an exclusive short story set in the same world as The Machinist novellas, featuring a new supervillain you haven’t met before. Once the Con is over, though, I’ll be taking the story offline… to be rereleased at a later, undetermined, date as part of a collection of short stories set in my Superpowered universe (shit, I’ve created a brand name now, haven’t I?).

Just to whet your appetites, here’s a look at Mark William’s astounding cover for the short story, which is titled Making Time I asked him for a black and white pencil sketch, and he made a fully painted, black-and-white image. Overachiever!

The link to grab it is going to be here, and it’ll be active in a day or two.

The first comic book I got as a kid was Justice League #220 (1983)–Since that was the year I was born, it was obviously a while before I actually read it and tried to comprehend what was going on. I remember that I liked the pictures and the fact that there were multiple versions of the characters I was familiar with like Superman, Batman, and the Flash–this issue was a 2-part crossover event between DC Comics’ Earth 1 and Earth 2, so there were alternate reality versions of everyone. This was also the issue in which DC retconned Black Canary’s origins so that she was her own daughter but brainwashed to have the mother’s memories. Guh. Imagine my five or six year old brain trying to wrap itself around that!

Back then, the big two publishers weren’t interested in making comic books accessible to new readers. There weren’t “jumping on point” events or reboots. But back then the origins of comic book characters could be summed up with tidy compound sentences like “After Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed by a mugger, he traveled the world and trained to become Batman, the Dark Knight Detective!” A neophyte like me was stranded in the deep end with the waves crashing over my head. But because I loved the stories and the characters I stayed afloat and I learned to ride those waves.

All the other issues I picked up in the superhero genre followed suit; Even if an issue was Part One of an arc there was something that carried over from a prior storyline, or some other bit of critical information that had happened previously and the writers assumed you knew about (the best you could hope for was an asterix and a tiny note saying “See Amazing Captain Atomic #216 – Editor”). So to me, the idea of having everything wrapped up tidily and presented in chronological order in a superhero story goes against everything I grew up with. I particularly dislike superhero movies because they follow the same, predictable origin story followed by overcoming insurmountable odds pattern instead of just jumping into the action. If all comic book movie writers acted as if they were doing sequels, explaining the protagonist’s backstory during the opening credits or at a crucial point early on, they’d be truer to their source material.

I believe in the old author adage, “show, don’t tell.” It’s more important to immediately demonstrate your hero’s virtue and your villain’s misanthropy than it is to show them in their formative, awkward years. Origin stories are something characters should only reveal to each other when the time is right, or when it is pertinent to the task at hand! Comics readers are used to jumping in to the middle of the action in an established, fully populated world!

I wrote The Machinist Part One: Malevolencewith the above mindset: I wanted to tell an action story and just get right into it. I sat down and created every character that appears in the book—some of them even have longer profiles in my files than they have descriptions in the story! But Part One wasn’t about them, it was about the titular supervillain and his particular misadventures. That’s not to say some characters won’t get fleshed out in Machinist Two, though. Mac, in particular, is going to have his entire life dissected. And there’s always Part Three for anyone that doesn’t get touched on… oh, and of course the spinoff titles! What comic book world would be complete without spinoffs?

I don’t know what took them so long to acknowledge the genre that is home to so many great authors like Marion Harmon, Austin Grossman, and Mercedes Lackey, but Amazon finally added a Superhero subcategory under Science Fiction and Fantasy. Guess who’s book is in the Top 5 paid books in the genre?

EDIT: I totally forgot to mention this: Malevolence is now available in print form for only $5.99. At 80-something pages of printed superhero action, that’s cheaper than two issues of your favorite monthly comic book and twice the story length. I’ll be giving a way a limited number of free copies at Philly Comic Con next month, but if you can’t make it there, feel free to buy one!

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The Machinist Part One: Malevolence published Feb 3, 2012.

Recently paroled supervillain Nicholas McHenry wants to get back in the game, cracking bank vaults and superhero skulls. But not even twenty-four hours go by before McHenry is arrested and humiliated by the world's foremost superhero team. Framed as the mastermind of a plot to take over the world, McHenry needs to clear his name with the heroes--But between him and his retribution stands an army of his villainous brethren, all of whom want him dead.